AMD’s powerful Radeon 9000 gaming CPUs are coming to laptops

Image AMD Not letting Nvidia have all the fun, AMD’s CPU lineup expands significantly at the end of 2025. Team Red has gaming and graphics on its mind with the long-awaited Zen 5 and Ryzen 9 – Gaming computers. Next up, the all-new RDNA 4-based Radeon RX 9700 cards aim to compete against Nvidia’s mid-range offerings, though we’ll need to wait a little longer to get any hint if AMD wants to compete in the world of high-end GPUs.

The two new AMD CPUs include the Ryzen 9 9900X3D and 9950X3D. The first is a 12-core, 24-thread configuration with a max boost of 5.5GHz and 140MB cache. The new top end of AMD’s consumer CPUs include 16 cores and 32 threads at 5.7GHz and 144MB of cache. We’re particularly interested in the all-new Ryzen 9 9955HX3D laptop chip. It has the same threads, cores, and TDP as a high-end desktop chip

Team Red fans have been chomping at the bit to get a look at AMD’s new gaming CPU. The top-end Ryzen 9 9950X3D is boosted by Zen 4. It promises over 20% better in-game performance than games like Hogwarts Legacy and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 Compared to AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D. However, you won’t see much difference between the two in a game like Black Legend Wukong or Cyberpunk 2077according to the chip maker. Benchmarks between the two chips are even sharper on productivity benchmarks, with results 13% better in Geekbench 6 and 16% better in Cinebench 2024.

Intel’s latest Arrow Lake desktop chips struggled with gaming performance, even compared to Intel’s 14th generation chips. AMD’s proposed benchmarks claim it outperforms the Intel Core Ultra 285K by varying degrees, though AMD has said it can get 41% more frames at Final Fantasy XIV And 45% more in Far Cry 6. Intel just launched its new versions of the Arrow Lake architecture with the Core Ultra H- and HX-series, and we’ll need to see more apples-to-apples comparisons in the future.

Both new desktop chips will be released sometime in the first quarter of 2025. The laptop-focused HX3D chip has a more uncertain time frame for the first half of 2025. We’ll have to wait several months before we see the chip on this year’s slate of PCs. Gaming laptops.

The other end of the consumer desktop spectrum will also get some love with the new Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT cards. If the names of these cards remind you of Nvidia’s latest cards, that’s because that’s intentional. The company said it is pushing the names to compete with the RTX 4070 and also conform to the naming convention on AMD’s high-end CPUs. The first AMD Radeon RDNA 4 processor aims to provide better ray tracing and AI processing capabilities through a confirmed 4nm process, not 3nm as previously rumored. Additionally, AMD said it plans to update the AI ​​Upscaler from FSR 3.5 to FSR 4. This should provide better 4K upscaling.

There’s not much to talk about, but the chipmaker has promised to provide more details closer to the release, sometime in the first quarter of this year.

AMD’s Ryzen Z1 is one of the most popular RDNA 3 chipsets for mobile devices, and AMD has confirmed that a Ryzen Z2 is just around the corner. The Z2 Extreme, which is still based on RDNA 3, will have an 8-core, 16-thread configuration and a 5GHz frequency. The Z2 Extreme can also do at 15-35W TDP compared to the regular Z2 at 15-30W. The “extreme” part of the name is actually in the number of graphics cores – 16 in total. Then there’s the Z2 Go, a more limited chip that has four cores, eight threads, and a maximum boost of 4.3GHz. This latest chip appears to be intended for the Lenovo Legion Go S laptop.

The company has dropped some hints that the Lenovo Legion Go, Asus ROG Ally, and even Valve’s Steam Deck may be looking to move to the Z2 Extreme in 2025. The Steam Deck currently uses a custom chip based on the Zen 2 architecture.

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